James Coombs says children with exactly the same marks are assigned different scores by statistical averaging, meaning some don’t get a place.
Photograph: Jill Mead for the Guardian

This Thursday an indignant parent, James Coombs, will stand in front of a tribunal to argue that the controversial 11-plus test needs greater scrutiny and that families should be shown their children’s raw scores. Why shouldn’t this important test, which changes the course of children’s lives, be open to evaluation like GCSEs and other life‑changing exams, he asks.

“It’s an existential problem to the grammar system. If you demonstrate that you cannot administrate a selective system in a fair way, then what you’re doing is illegal,” he says.

Coombs, representing himself, will be up against a barrister for the Information Commissioner’s Office, defending its decision last year [pdf] to uphold the wish of the test-provider, CEM, to withhold the scores, requested by Coombs under Freedom of Information.

CEM, the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring, part of Durham University, argued that disclosing the information could prejudice its commercial interests. It said it had created a tutor-proof test – and that if the raw scores were released, 11-plus tutors would be able to teach to the test. But CEM has since admitted that its 11-plus test is not tutor-proof at all.

Last week Education Guardian reported that CEM was unlikely - on moral grounds - to be among bidders to provide a new government test for reception pupils.

Thursday’s hearing is the latest stage of battle that has so far taken four years. “It started with my son getting his [11-plus] results and not doing well,” explains Coombs. “He was distraught. He went to a small primary and he was always the smartest in the class. I wanted to understand what was wrong with this test.”

Coombs, a solutions architect for a mobile phone company in Reading, Berkshire, also has wider objections to selection – and especially to the mystery that surrounds the scoring of the 11-plus. It offends his sense of accuracy and fairness, he says.

“Entry [to selective schools] is dependent on cram-feeding children with expensive tutors that not everyone can afford. Tutoring is an insurmountable problem that makes it impossible to operate in a non‑discriminatory and legal way.”

There appears to be no chance of the 11-plus disappearing anytime soon. The new education secretary, Damian Hinds, has called for a grammar school in every town. The last secretary of state, Justine Greening, is said to have left partly because she did not have the stomach to introduce more grammars.

Coombs wants to demonstrate to parents that grammar school admissions depend not on pupils’ ability plotted against a constant, standardised population, but on their ability compared only to children that year, in that area of the country. “If you had the raw marks, you could see that ‘Oh, my child got the same mark as that child last year, but for some reason they’ve not got into that school that they would have got into last year,’” he says.

He also wants to demonstrate that, as he puts it, “precision is not the same as accuracy” when it comes to test scores. Every test has “confidence limits” – a statistical margin for error assigned because no test can be 100% accurate. A 95% confidence interval would be reasonable for this sort of test, but this would mean that pupils scoring the same number of right answers would be separated through a standardisation process.

Coombs says the marking system can assign one child a mark of 202.34 and another 202.41 even though both pupils scored 60 correct answers out of 80. “If a school admits Jane, with 60 correct answers, while excluding John – with 60 correct answers – John’s parents should have the right to know why,” he says.

How does he rate his chances up against the barrister on Thursday? He laughs. “The arguments are all in my favour, but on the other side is the legal system and the information commissioner. So, finely balanced.”